"I'm going to speak my mind because I have nothing to lose."--S.I. Hayakawa

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Monday, September 26, 2011

Thelma and Louise Take a Time Out

For lack of anything else that piqued my interest, I turned the TV to A&E and some reruns. I was only half aware of the show as I cruised the internet on my laptop, when the TV suddenly switched to record Thelma and Louise.

Better than nothing, I thought as I moved to the couch to watch the movie. (Brad Pitt was so cute then.)

So we get to the pivotal scene, the one where the gals’ adventure goes all wrong. Louise has just rescued an intoxicated Thelma from her attacker in the parking lot of the saloon. She’s holding a pistol on him.

I waited for the impetus that caused Louise to pull the trigger. The bad guy cuts loose with a string of profanity. Louise shoots.

And later on, out in the desert when the slimy long-haul trucker is getting a lesson in manners? Well, he says, “Fry you, you witches from hell!” Naughty, naughty. Got his tanker truck blown up for that.

Okay, this was on Oprah’s OWN channel. (That's O-W-N, which I guess stands for Oprah Winfrey Network as well as being her own TV channel.) Cleaned it up for the kiddies, I reckon. We can see rape, domestic abuse, implicit sexual expressions, violence, celebrating armed robbery, and extra-marital sex (okay, just the kissing), but we can’t hear the words that usually accompany these things and impel violent reactions ?

I’m definitely not a fan of the gratuitous profanity that has been the rage in a lot of movies for far too long. That's the reason I never watched HBO's critically acclaimed series called Deadwood, or something. I found it hard to believe that in those days, the Old West, everyone used such frequent and profound profanity.

Louise was watching out for her friend. That’s what girlfriends do.

But driven to pulling the trigger by “Clean my clock?” All this did was pull my concentration from the plot and moral of the story and direct it to listening for more incredibly hilarious substitutions.